This 1949 classic tells of a society called “Oceania”, where everything is controlled by the government. It is led by a character named “Big Brother”, who enjoys a cult of personality popularity with many, (Obama?) but in the book, he might not really exist. The central character of the book has a job where he re-writes history so it will support the current party line – revisionist history.

The book also gave us the famous phrase “Big Brother is Watching You,” referring to the total, complete domination of everyone’s lives by the government. You can never get away from surveillance.

Monitoring the records of as many as a billion phone calls, as some news reports have suggested, is no modest invasion of privacy. It is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked. Our lives are now so digitized that the government going from computer to computer or phone to phone is the modern equivalent of the same type of tyranny that our Founders rebelled against.

He also said these privacy invasions hurt our efforts at national security:

I also believe that trolling through millions of phone records hampers the legitimate protection of our security. The government sifts through mountains of data yet still didn’t notice, or did not notice enough, that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was traveling to Chechnya. Perhaps instead of treating every American as a potential terror suspect the government should concentrate on more targeted analysis.

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